The strategically distributed nature of wind power presents unique challenges. A wind power plant comprises several wind turbines and may be located offshore, and it often covers large geographic areas.
These factors usually require a variety of networked interconnections and telecommunication technologies for monitoring and controlling wind power electric generating facilities which often are referred to as SCADA (SCADA: Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition).
The prior art presents several ways of controlling a wind turbine and wind power plants. U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,754 teaches a method for monitoring wind turbines, by means of image and acoustic monitoring. This is an example of a wind turbine to control itself on the basis of dynamical measurement of factors within the wind turbine. European patent application EP 1519040 discloses a method for a remote reading and changing of power settings in wind turbine generators.
Today, the focus has moved from the separate turbine connection points to the central wind power plant connection point, often referred to as the “point of common coupling” (PCC). One of the most limiting factors when performing central control of a wind power plant with several wind turbines is the time it takes to gather information from all turbines and distributing control data, e.g. new active or reactive power set points to all turbines. This may be a problem since the requirements to wind power plant response times have increased considerably during the recent years. It is an object of the invention to provide a faster communication to and from wind turbines, thereby optimizing the central control of wind power plants.